Month: May 2017

All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $225 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And we believe it!

Today I’ll share a few quotes from Seth Godin’s book “All Marketers Are Liars”.

They will help you understand why you must reinforce what your target market already believes.

Godin writes that “worldview is the term I use to refer to the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation. A worldview is not who you are. It’s what you believe. It’s your biases”.

Here are several thought-provoking quotes from Godin’s book:

This on why stories should agree with your customer’s worldview:

Great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

This on why you shouldn’t try to change someone’s worldview (even if the facts and data reveal they are wrong):

Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy most smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of the worldview and you win.

This, on preconceived worldviews:

Worldviews are the reason that two intelligent people can look at the same data and walk away with completely different conclusions—it’s not that they didn’t have access to the data or that they have poor reasoning skill, it’s simply that they had already put themselves into a particular worldview before you even asked the question.

Finally and most importantly:

Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.

“A company without a story is a company without a strategy”. **
Having a clear and distinctive story is critical in building your company’s brand.

However, there’s a difference between broadcasting your story–storytelling–and living your story, or storydoing.

Understanding the difference between the two and making that shift toward the latter is fundamental to building your business.***

From Storytelling to Storydoing
So, how do you effectively get the story of your brand and your service into the world?

Shift to storydoing.
It’s telling people what you do and then doing it. People talk about a service that is remarkable… a service that is worth remarking about.

90 percent of people trust a friend’s recommendation.
People are more influential than ever.
Those recommendations are based on great experiences.

The old adage continues to ring true: Actions speak louder than words.

What Makes a Great Storydoing Company

Storydoers are structured differently. They all put their story at the center of their Company and build it into their services and products.

They know what they are for and what they are against.

Great story-doing companies are on a quest. They define an ambition, beyond making money, that comes through in everything they do. Being the biggest or the most financially successful is not a quest. There has to be a fundamental generosity for a quest to inspire. It has to be something that inspires people to join and evangelize.

Zappos is on a quest to create an amazing customer experience regardless of cost. It makes that real in its culture, even offering money to customer service employees to leave after a couple of months if they don’t love their jobs.

The enemy is bad service … which brings us to the final story-doing attribute:

Great Storydoing Companies have a defined enemy.
JetBlue was created to fight against the bland and brutalist experience on the major national air carriers. Its stated quest was to “bring humanity back to airlines.” It didn’t do that through slogans asking you to “fly the friendly skies,” but rather expressed it through experience: one class of service. Leather seats for everyone. Satellite TV for everyone. Unlimited (and free) snacks for everyone.

In the networked world, shifting from storytelling to storydoing will make your business not only more efficient and effective but also fundamentally more rewarding–for your customers, your staff and your community… and for you.

(*edited Inc magazine article by Rosemarie Ryan)

(**Marc Andreessen, co-founder Netscape)

(***According to Brand Asset Valuator, overall scores of brand quality, brand loyalty, and brand trust are in decline, down 24 percent, 31 percent, and 50 percent, respectively. Perceived value is dropping as well.
Ask CEO’s whether their services or products are differentiated from the competition and 80 percent will say yes.
In stark contrast, just 10 percent of customer agree.)

Remarkable always gets talked about. Marketing starts with having a service that is ‘better’ than the competition, giving clients what they really want, being remarkable and worthy of being discussed by your clients and potential clients.

1. Making promises and keeping them…
is a great way to build a brand. This is one of the ‘first and foremost’ branding lessons. Emphasis on making promises as well as keeping them is required.

2. Your best clients…
are worth far more than your average clients. It starts with knowing who your clients are, then knowing the best of the group.

3. Conversations among the members of your marketplace.
Conversations happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations, the ones that create the basis for your word of mouth marketing.

4. You’re viewing marketing as an expense.
Good marketers realize that marketing is an investment.

5. Clients don’t buy what they need.
They buy what they want. Gather as many insights as possible by observing what they do.

Client Centric Marketing, a division of MB Marketing, Inc., teaches Advisors how to work with the qualified friends, family and colleagues of their most valuable clients, the clients they want to duplicate.